Spring Snow on the Sunshine Coast
Spring snow is very unusual on Canada’s Sunshine Coast, a hidden and remote gem not far from Vancouver, BC, but isolated by the incredibly deep fjord known as Howe Sound. Towering mountains dive straight down more than a thousand in some places.
This year, we were very suprised after an almost snowless winter by a sudden heavy snowfall that left the one winding highway that runs a hundred miles up the Lower Sunshine Coast to the next ferry.
Coastal snow is nothing like anywhere else. If you can drive like a champion in three feet of snow in Alberta or Ontario, congratulations!
I have, too. But if you come to the coast when there’s an inch of snow on the ground, you’ll wish you’d just parked it for the one day (or less) it will take for it to melt.
Driving on snow, especially spring snow on the coast, is like driving on a layer of ice covered in warm lard, followed by a layer of hot ball bearings and topped with a second load of warm lard. Added to that is the equivalent of a nutcase with a CO2 fire extinguisher who keeps shooting shots of CO2 at the mixture to keep the ice frozen, yet wet.
Good tires really help. I have expensive mud and snow tires on the all-wheel-drive, and have to really step on it and crank it around corners to get it to spin, but that’s not the problem. The problem is all the other heroes on the road who don’t have good tires, can’t drive in any kind of snow, and don’t know what this snow is really like. They hurtle along the highways and byways in blinding snow and can’t understand why they pinball off things like trees and other cars when they lose control.
Anyway, spring snow is a beautiful and all too fleeting treat on the coast, and I always enjoy it. I just have to watch out for cars (and 4x4s).